by Chuck Dixon
The boy asked how they arrived at the island and where their boat was. Caroline explained that they had been robbed and marooned by the crew of a merchant ship that promised to carry them to Alexandria. This was a story she worked out before falling asleep but added the part where they were Romans on a whim. She told him that her name was Commodus and that Dwayne was Maximus. These were the first names that came to her mind. Back on the Ocean Raj, two nights before leaving, they’d watched Gladiator on DVD at Dwayne’s insistence. Caroline never cared for movies much but had fun annoying Dwayne by pointing out every historical inaccuracy.
The boy nodded as Caroline finished her story. He turned and spoke to the old man who nodded as well. The pair had a lengthy exchange in which the boy did much of the talking in a language Caroline could not identify. After this the pair rose to their feet.
“He is Roman as well? He does not speak Latin,” the boy said and nodded toward Dwayne.
“He’s a Gaul. A barbarian who purchased citizenship,” Caroline said with mock scorn. Something like that wouldn’t be possible for a few more centuries. She was counting on the boy not knowing that.
The boy nodded sagely.
“What of us? What will you tell Ahinadab? Will you tell him we were only on this island due to misfortune?” Caroline said as the boy helped the old man up the planks to the deck above.
“We will tell him you are not spies. He will spare you.”
“Spare us?”
“He will probably sell you as slaves when we next reach port.” The boy shrugged and picked up the oil lamp and empty basket.
“Tell me your name,” Caroline said.
“Praxus,” the boy said as he took the light from them. “Praxus of Samos.”
35
Another Time in Rome
In another place on another day, Andrea Spara was deep in the stacks of Vatican Apostolic Library doing the thing he did each day—reading.
He was a common fixture in the stacks of the esteemed collection, ever since being freed by an endowment from a dead-end associate professorship at Sapienza Università di Roma. It was over ten years ago that a benefactor had granted him his lifelong dream of reading and studying ancient Latin texts in their original manuscript form. His every financial need was covered, and he had an excellent apartment in Piazza Barberini that he only visited to bathe and sleep. His every waking hour, aside from a hurried breakfast of rolls and coffee and a simple meat or fish dinner, was spent in the confines of university libraries in Rome and Naples or here in the cloistered confines of the Vatican’s treasure trove of ancient books.
His only duty to his benefactor was to report any new discovery or unusual finding in whatever manuscripts he read. That was an odd request in, itself. Andrea was fascinated by the language and the nuance and seeing the words of the ancients in their own hand. But he knew, by their very nature, that there could never be anything new found there. Hundreds, thousands of scholars had read and examined these words since they were first recorded and re-recorded by scribes from all over the ancient and medieval world. Papers and theses and libraries of books had been written examining even the most trivial literary works of the Romans and Greeks of the classical era. What would he find that they could not? Still, it made no sense to question a gift from the gods, especially a gift that allowed Andrea to live within these walls and drink in the wealth of knowledge they contained without the distasteful burden of making a living.
Most visitors to the library were only allowed access to the manuscripts via scanned images viewed on a computer monitor. But Andrea, thanks to the influence of his patron, was granted permission to read the actual words on the medium upon which they were written by the hand of the author. He was allowed access to the climate-controlled rooms in the library’s cellar, and whatever scroll or book he requested would be brought to him—except those contained in the Secret Archives, of course. But those were religious texts and held no interest for him in any case.
Today he sat in a comfortable chair of rich leather at a broad table in a glass-walled booth. He laid out a rolled sheet of vellum that almost covered the entire flat surface. Andrea was assisted in this by an elderly Barnabite bishop he had come to know well over the years of his daily, excepting Sundays, visits to the library. They laid the vellum flat and weighted the corners with fist-sized bags of sand. The vellum was still supple despite its age, thanks to the restoration and preservation talents of generations of priests and monks who worked to ensure that these fragile treasures remained intact until the day of the Rapture.
The bishop left him to his work, and Andrea took to examining the document written in Latin by a lively hand that was a joy to read. It was the Codex Profectus Praxus, an abridged work written by a Greek slave over two thousand years before and, most unusually, translated into Latin by the original author. It was a tale of the journeys in the Aegean Sea made special by being the first written reference in western literature of Halley’s Comet. But there was even more of interest in this personal memoir of a slave who served as an assistant to an oracle aboard a Phoenician pirate ship in the days when Carthage ruled the inland sea.
It was filled with details that others would find tedious, but which Andrea found fascinating. Chief among these was experiencing the resonance that came from reading and touching, albeit through acid-free cotton gloves, a document written in the hand of the author.
That it survived to this day was a miracle. The original Profectus was thought to have been lost in the fire that leveled the library at Alexandria. It was always a thrill to read the words as scribed on the actual document. Andrea could feel a contact with the humble slave and nimble wordsmith across the gulf of time that separated them.
He came to the passages about the bireme on which Praxus served coming to a hidden harbor for the crew to take on fresh water and hide a treasure of gold and silver coin looted from a trade ship separated from its escort fleet in a storm. Though Andrea had read this text in copies and in the original several times, he looked forward especially to this portion where Praxus writes of the high degree of fear among the crew that their theft would be discovered and the punishment they would receive if captured by the rightful owners of the chest of coins.
Andrea read a passage. Then he read it again. Something was not right. He looked about him through the glass entry wall of the booth. The bishop was busy speaking to a pair of priests, and not watching through the observation-glass.
Andrea removed a magnifying glass from his jacket pocket. It was equipped with LED lights, and he held it close above the vellum. Direct light of any kind was forbidden in these booths, but Andrea had to confirm what he saw. He turned his back on the bishop and concealed the light with his body.
To his eye, he could see no alterations to the text. He switched the light on the glass to UV and bent back to the scroll. No signs of erasure or overwriting. It could not be. The text was different from the last time he had read this piece. It was substantially altered, from what he could recall. Andrea took out a notepad and copied by hand the passages concerning the events on the tiny island and the voyage from there to the boat’s next destination.
He signaled to the bishop that he was done for the day.
“Is there a problem, Signor Spara?” the bishop asked with concern.
“A bit of queasiness. Something I ate, perhaps. Or the flu.” He departed the room without helping the old bishop restore the vellum to its protective case; something he had never done before.
On the main floor of the library, he hurried to the wing off the Sala di Consultazione where the computer stations were set up. Row after row of sheltered stations where one could explore every document in the public section of the library’s collection. Andrea called up an Italian language translation of the Profectus Praxus and scrolled to the section in question.
In this edition, the pirate bireme anchored in the hidden harbor and buried the chest of coins, then departed the same day for Rhodes. It was the same as e
very other time he had read this text. Until today.
Andrea called up the scans of the original manuscript and slid the cursor to the same section. It was the same. The boat arrived at the island, hid the treasure, then departed on the evening tide.
The scan made several years before differed from the original he had just read down in the archives.
But how could that be? Was his memory failing? Was this Alzheimers? He’d seen a professor at university turned into a blithering idiot, quick to anger one moment and catatonic the next. Was that happening to him? But he was only forty-eight. Wasn’t that too soon?
Or was this precisely why his benefactor endowed him to do nothing with his life but read ancient texts in the original? Was he supposed to be reading Herodotus and Tacitus, looking for changes no one else had seen or noted? What could explain this? He was not a man of faith. He did not believe in miracles. But had he just witnessed one?
Later, in his apartment, he sat in his favorite chair with his cell phone clutched in his hand. A bottle of red wine sat open on the table by him. He was normally a sipper, perhaps a half glass before bed. This time he drank from the bottle, and it did little to still his nerves. Was he a fool, or was this what was expected of him?
At last, he dialed.
A voice answered first in English and switched to Italian when Andrea identified himself. He was politely asked to hold. The music on hold was a pleasant arrangement of a Verdi overture, and he wondered if even the hold music was custom chosen for each caller.
Inside of ten minutes, a voice came on the phone speaking in rich, fluent Neapolitan-accented Italian.
“Andrea, so nice of you to call. I trust you have something for me?”
“Yes, it is an alteration to—” Andrea began, but the voice on the other end gently cut him off.
“I wish to hear of your finding in every detail. But not over the phone. Pack a bag, Andrea. Bring enough for three days. The morning after tomorrow, a car will come to collect you.”
“Um, yes?” Andrea had so many questions, but the line was dead.
His bell rang the morning after the next day, and he was met at the door by a smiling man in a fine suit who held a hand out for his bag.
“My name is Augustus Martin. You were expecting me, yes?” the man said in Italian free of any accent.
The Rolls limousine took him out of the city beyond the Grande Raccordo to an executive airport in Ara Nova, where a sleek Gulfstream sat on the hardstand along the main runway. Signor Martin took Andrea’s bag and walked him to the steps that led up into the plane.
Sir Neal Harnesh was waiting in the main salon of the plane and offered Andrea a glass of sparkling wine.
“I prefer this so much to a traditional breakfast,” Sir Neal said. He was dressed as though for a golf game in a short-sleeved shirt, slacks, and loafers. But each garment was of such quality that, even though he wore the best suit he could afford, Andrea felt underdressed.
His benefactor kept the conversation light and inconsequential until they were airborne and high over the Adriatic.
“What have you found, Signor Spara?” Sir Neal said.
“An anomaly, my lord,” Andrea said.
He handed a Xerox copy he’d made from his own paperback edition of the Codex Profectus Praxus to Sir Neal. The relevant passages were highlighted. Sir Neal read them then took another paper offered by Andrea. It was a version of the codex that Andrea had typed up in Italian from his notes.
“They are substantially different, obviously,” Sir Neal said gravely.
“Yes, my lord. In every version, the pirates spend one day on the island and leave without incident the same day. Here we see that Praxus spoke with two prisoners they took from the island and remained anchored until the following day, which led to—”
“I appreciate the difference, Signor Spara,” Sir Neal said, holding up a manicured hand. “The prisoners. The author describes them as a young boy and a cyclops.”
“Oh, ‘cyclops’ does not refer to a person with a single eye. That’s a common misconception people take away from Homer’s Odyssey. It simply means a giant.”
“A giant.”
“Well, anyone of two meters in height would appear to be a giant to people in that time.”
“He says they were Romans, Signor Spara.”
“It is possible. Rome was just beginning to extend its power to the sea in this period. But Romans traveled widely throughout the region in this period.”
“And the other events in this codex, Signor Spara?”
“Those are much harder to explain.”
“I see,” Sir Neal said, and sat back with hands templed before him. He gazed out the port to the clouds drifting past like smoke.
“This is monumental! This will be an earth-shattering revelation in the world of ancient academia!” Andrea’s excitement could no longer be contained.
“No, it will not be a revelation of any kind, signor.” Sir Neal’s eyes met his. All traces of polite suavity were gone from his voice and his eyes.
“But if I were to publish what I’ve found I—” Sir Neal Harnesh held up his hand again.
“You are paid to read only, Signor Spara. Not to write. Certainly not to publish.”
Andrea Spara nodded in agreement. But within him, he felt his heart shrink. To find something so marvelous and be obliged to remain silent would be like torture.
A week later, a tragic and unexplained fire occurred within the antiquities section of the Vatican Apostolic Library. The blaze was contained by the state-of-the-art Halon system installed in the library in the 1990s. The only casualties were an unemployed former associate professor of ancient languages, who died at the scene from smoke inhalation, and a rare Latin manuscript that was entirely consumed in the blaze.
The Vatican’s head librarian, Bibliothecarius XLIX, issued a statement mourning the death of Andrea Spara, a visiting scholar, and regretted the loss of the irreplaceable manuscript penned by a Greek slave in 198 BC. But he assured the public that the manuscript was fully scanned and has been preserved for the ages in digital format.
36
Coming Around
Boats pumped Jimbo with enough antihistamines to make him sleep around the clock. When he woke up in his cabin aboard the Raj, his leg was stiff, but most of the swelling was gone. He uncovered the port to let sunlight lance into his eyes.
Jimbo was dressing when Boats knocked then entered his cabin without invitation.
“We haven’t heard from your friends since I brought you back.”
“Friends?”
“The girl stayed behind with Roenbach.”
“How long?”
“Almost two days now.”
“Shit,” Jimbo said and brushed past Boats.
Jimbo was shaky after the effects of the toxin and the long drug-induced sleep. He grabbed coffee and a cheese sandwich in the galley on his way down to the Tube chamber.
Morris Tauber was speaking to Parviz and Quebat in the chamber. The Tube was powered down. There was a puddle of water on the floor where the icy condensation had run off. A motorized inflatable sat in a corner of the chamber. It was marked with the name of the Ocean Raj down each side.
The discussion was volatile, at least from Morris’ end. The two Iranians remained as calm and reasoned as they always were.
“I’m tired of hearing the reasons you can’t give me juice. I want the power, and I want it now.” The usually passive Morris was raising his voice. He looked like hell, with his hair wild and deep gray rings under his eyes.
“We are restricted to the laws of thermodynamics,” Quebat said purposely.
“If we strain the connections, we risk the entire system,” Parviz said, biting off each word as if he were repeating them for a stubborn child.
“Update me,” Jimbo said, stepping into the circle and gesturing with a sandwich half. The trio turned to him in mild surprise.
“That coffee for me?” Morris said.
; “It is now.” Jimbo handed the mug over.
“Caroline insisted, hell, she demanded to go back to bring you to the Raj. I should have known she’d pull a stunt like this.” Morris sank into a chair at the computer array and held the mug in both hands.
Parviz and Quebat took that as a cue to exit the chamber as quickly and quietly as possible.
“And you haven’t heard from them?” Jimbo took the other chair.
“We powered up the Tube last night. We received their last recorded text message. They saw a ship on course for the island. The message was on repeat, and the signal was clear. But no live response to my transmission even though we held the field open for a full thirty minutes. There’s only one reason for that.”
“There’s a million reasons for that, Mo. Maybe they had to move and couldn’t get back to the hide. Maybe there’s a glitch somewhere. It doesn’t have to mean the worst.”
“Boats wanted to go back to find them. I wouldn’t let him go alone,” Morris said and slurped a mouthful of coffee and winced. These Ethiopians made it strong and sweet.
“Good for you. As soon as you can open the field Boats and I will go back together.”
“I’ve been trying to light a fire under those two Persians. But all they do is give me excuses.”
“Look, Mo, I know you’re freaked. Imagine how I feel. I left a man behind, you know? But we’re not in a rush here. I know you’re in a hurry to find out what happened. So am I. But let’s do this right. We have all the time in the world, am I right?”
“Yeah. You’re right. Time is moot for us.” Morris smiled wearily. “And that’s the glitch. Just by being back there this length of time we change the environment. It’s too much exposure.”